Routing
Five visits can be a six-hour day or an eight-hour day, and the difference usually isn't traffic. It's the order you drove them in.
Google Maps and Apple Maps are extremely good at one question: what's the fastest way from here to there? That's not the question a home-health day asks. Yours is: given six addresses, two of which have time windows, one that takes an hour, and a caseload where three are must-see today — what order should I drive them in?
That's a different kind of problem, and doing it in your head each morning is why some days quietly cost you ninety minutes.
Grouping visits by neighborhood feels efficient and often is — until a time window forces you back across town. One badly placed window can undo an entire well-clustered route.
A 60-minute eval scheduled last is fine on paper and brutal in practice, because everything that runs late during the day lands on top of it.
A route that ignores your starting point can send you past your own street on the way out and back again at 5 PM. Both of those drives count as mileage, and one of them is avoidable.
The under-appreciated benefit: a planned day gives you a defensible mileage figure for free. The route distance is your business mileage between patients, so planning the day and logging it stop being two separate chores.
Most caseloads have a rhythm: a patient at 3×/week, another every other week, a plan of care with a fixed number of authorized visits. Planning one day at a time means that rhythm lives in your head, and the things that fall through are the ones you were supposed to remember.
Planning the week instead lets you see the shape of it — which day is overloaded, who hasn't been seen, whose authorization is nearly out. Fixing an overloaded Tuesday on Sunday takes a moment. Discovering it on Tuesday morning does not.
You pick the day's patients — or take your usual weekday list in one tap — and it orders the drive using real road distances, honors time windows, and shows arrival times plus a "leave by" warning for the next visit. One button hands the whole trip to Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze, whichever you actually use.
A second button plans the entire week at once, spreading visits across days according to each patient's plan of care, skipping every-other-week patients on their off weeks, and never scheduling past an authorization. And because every routed day is recorded, the mileage log and the earnings totals fill themselves in behind you.
Open VisitWell — free during early accessWorks offline in dead zones. No app store, no signup.